My attention was caught by this article discussing the choice of movie that Tim Walz took his future wife Gwen to on their first date.
It was Falling Down, a 1993 drama featuring Michael Douglas as a man who loses his cool from being stuck in traffic and goes on a rampage. (In 1993, this was apparently satire.) The article's author hadn't even heard of this film. I had; I remember noting it from when it came out and putting it on my "maybe I'll go see this" list, though I never actually did.
But what a strange pick for a first date movie? Perhaps less so when you consider they were living in a small town in rural Nebraska with only one movie theater, so there wasn't much choice.
Looking back to when B. and I were dating - this would be 1987-9 in our case - I can't recall our going to the movies. B. is not a movie person, and even less of a movie theater person, and I'm not that much of those either. Once we moved in together, we rented a fair number of movies (VHS from Blockbuster in those days) and watched them at home, but our dates were to classical and folk music concerts, science-fiction/fantasy clubs and book discussions, and Regency dances.
The only movie either of us can recall going out to together in our dating days hardly counted as a date, because it was in the daytime, and the theater was packed with enthusiasts, many of them people we knew. It was a sneak preview showing of the yet-unreleased The Princess Bride. We were all big fans of the book, an entity almost forgotten about these days. And we were very happy with what we saw. The Princess Bride remains my gold standard for an excellent adaptation of a book to a movie, and the fact that the script was by the original novelist probably has a lot to do with it.
I would also rate The Last Unicorn highly for the same reason, and it also comes to mind as one of a number of delicate fantasies from the early 1980s that I saw on dates before I ever met B. Another one that I remember with particular fleeting fondness is one that I caught on an exceedingly brief theatrical run in Berkeley, after which it vanished and was never heard of again. It was a goofy story made by the unusual technique of cut-out stop-motion animation, and it was called Twice Upon a Time.
Actually it did have both VHS and DVD releases, not that I ever laid eyes on either. But it was hardly in theaters at all, and today it's not online in full. This clip will give you a better idea of what the movie as a whole is like than other clips on YouTube, and yes that is Lorenzo Music, better-known as the voice of Garfield the cat, asking most of the questions. (Other voices, Marshall Efron and Julie Payne.) *sigh* I really ought to go find a copy of this and see it again.
(Not regarding movies, but I've been introduced to "Colin from Portsmouth," a parody of a right-wing ranter on British call-in radio. This one on Elon Musk is one of the funniest, as well as on a topic that Americans will get.)
I saw a lot of movies at the theater in the 1990s, including "Falling Down." You're right that it's definitely not what most people would think of as a date movie, but although it's flawed, it does launch from a serious premise that might appeal to Gov. Walz: the protagonist has recently lost his job as a defense contractor due to the Cold War ending, and he's struggling to understand where he fits in a changing world.
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